


EF-5

by simplyprologue



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s02e06 One Step Too Many, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Nature Metaphors With Emily, Past Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-21
Updated: 2015-04-21
Packaged: 2018-03-25 01:22:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3791362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Groaning, he reaches for where his phone sits on the coffee table, carefully holding the towel to his shoulder. He ignores the notifications for missed calls and new voicemails and emails, scrolling through his contacts until he’s found Mac’s number, and dials.</p><p>She picks up after the first ring.</p>
            </blockquote>





	EF-5

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** I don't entirely know where this fic came from. I watched a NOVA documentary on tornadoes on Netflix and then started watching _Daredevil_ wherein the line “I can take a beating. Learned it from my Dad," appeared, albeit in a completely different context than it's used here and suddenly I had a (canon-compliant, my apologies) fic for the six month time jump during _One Step Too Many_ that was an amalgation of a lot of my headcanons (Will's siblings, Mac knowing field medicine, a few other things) and such. Thanks to Pippa and Emily C for their encouragement and beta skills!
> 
> Timeline: John dies Friday March 16, and then Will goes on the morning show and dumps Nina that next Thursday, March 22. So this takes place March 24/25 putting a week and a day between John’s death and funeral. 
> 
> Warnings for blood and past child abuse.

Pain blossoms, radiating up and down his arm. The bleeding won’t stop, he’s tried, and he can’t reach the deeper cut on his back regardless. Cursing himself again, he wonders why he didn’t stop after the third glass of Jameson. Or the fourth. The fifth, as if one more drink would chase away the fact that today he left his sisters and his brother to bury their father.

The worst part is that they understood.

There will always been at least three people in this world who know his first secrets. Because they, too, hurt. But less, and because he was there to hurt more.

 _Will, you don’t have to do this,_ Lizzie said over the phone.

He could imagine her standing at the nurse’s station in her cardiology wing at the regional medical center as if their father hadn’t died there days before, as if she could only be a cardiothoracic surgeon, pretend that being on the receiving end of condolences wasn’t bothering her.

_You don’t have to come back here for this. We can put him in the ground for you. It’s the least we can do, really. Billy. Don’t come home._

He started drinking early; it’s a Saturday.

They started calling early, too, right after the burial. It was Fiona first, to complain about Lizzie, frantically bitching about how _Lizbeth is going to pick a fight with Aunt Edie, I know it, and you’re gonna have to fly out here to defend her for assault against a bigoted old lady so just please, Billy, just tell her to keep it together ‘cause she sure as fuck-all isn’t listening to me. Love you. Bye. Fuck._ And then Mickey, probably sneaking a cigarette on the back porch, firmly out of their doctor sister’s line of sight: _Fi is getting an interesting drunk. I think she and Liz might go round for round, I think it’s the house. I dunno. Just wanted to hear your take on it. Take care of yourself, old man._ Then Liz, probably sitting in her car, or standing outside of it if her kids were there, _I hate our family. I hate all of them. I got Mom’s rosary, the one you asked Dad for when she died. It was just sitting in her old jewelry box. I’ll mail it to you. I’m going back to the hotel with Mickey and Fi now, we’re going to sit in the bar for a while. Give us a call. Or give me one, so I know you’re not overdosing again. That’d be nice. Love you, jackass._

They kept calling, and after the second ring, he’d send them to voicemail.

(Mickey, again: _Hey, Billy. We were gonna turn you on the television but then we remembered you don’t do Saturdays. Lizbeth and Fi want proof of life._ And Fiona took the phone, and in the brief interim between voices he could hear the clinking of bottles, the din of the bar of the Lincoln Sheraton. _Will, you’re dumb but I need you. The marrieds are hassling me. I need you._

And then they hung up.)

So he reached for the whiskey, and began to pour.

At some point, after the sixth or seventh glass, the sun went down. With fingers numbed with liquor he carried his ashtray and a pack of cigarettes to the balcony, and began again. And then, when at last his nerves were quieted, went to bed.

He got up only to get a bottle of aspirin. But his foot landed wrong, or perhaps his toes were numb too, or perhaps he’s just been unsteady since he first got the phone call from the ER nurse who didn’t know that Dr. Cutler’s maiden name was McAvoy. He went down, landing on the glass-topped end table at the foot of his bed, coming to rest on the sharpened fragments.

And now the bleeding won’t stop.

Groaning, he reaches for where his phone sits on the coffee table, carefully holding the towel to his shoulder. He ignores the notifications for missed calls and new voicemails and emails, scrolling through his contacts until he’s found Mac’s number, and dials.

She picks up after the first ring.

 

* * *

 

When Will said that something was wrong at one in the morning after his father’s funeral, MacKenzie admittedly didn’t have high hopes for the situation, but she also didn’t expect to find him bleeding on his couch.

Her first instinct is to ask for the details, but then she supposes she already knows them: his father died last Friday, he went on ACN Morning on Thursday, and the funeral was this morning, and somehow that has all added up to what she can currently estimate to be a dozen or so lacerations on his torso and arms.

“We have to go the emergency room,” she says, attempting to keep her voice even as she sits down next to him.

His shirt is shredded, and when she lifts a careful hand to his back, she finds a piece of glass sticking out from the roping muscle above his shoulder blade. Her face close to his neck, she can tell that he smells like whiskey and a pack of cigarettes and the picture draws itself somewhat clearer; Will’s never been a particularly graceful drunk.

He winces, gingerly shrugging her off. “No. No hospitals.”

Swallowing hard, she reminds herself to stay calm. Mac takes an edifying breath, leans over to the table at her end of the couch, and turns on the lamp perched atop of it. The wounds look worse with the lights on.  

“Will, this—this needs stitches.” Her affect is flat, and forced, and he twitches when she runs her fingers gently over the glass-filled gash on his back.

“No it doesn’t,” he answers, perhaps too quickly.

Her calm breaks. “Okay, that’s what I said when I got stabbed, and I wound up in an ICU in Germany.”

Something blanches Will’s face, until all that is left are pinpricks of color in his cheeks. Then with a drunken sort of slowness, he rebuilds his determination, and shakes his head.

“It’s my shoulder.”

Mac sighs, her fingertips just touching to fabric of his t-shirt, parting the ripped halves. “This is deep.”

There are other cuts, of course, so she skims her hand down his back and his front, and thankfully finds none as deep. But her fingers find a third, a fourth, a fifth. The sixth, she thinks, a curved laceration on his left bicep, might also need to be stitched but unless Will takes his shirt off she won’t be able to tell. And there are old scars, too, other pearlescent tissues that healed wrong into unfortunate hills of skin under Liz’s amateur hands.

The one under his chin, the one at his hairline that hair and makeup can’t always hide.

She knows why she’s always been at the brunt of Elizabeth McAvoy Cutler’s cold fury; Will was the first person she ever tried to heal. The ferocious emails and voicemails didn’t stop for months after the break-up while on the other hand the Christmas cards have never stopped coming from Michael and his wife, nor the timid attempts at communication from Fiona, but Mac has always written it off as a temporal closeness or perhaps more accurately, a codependency between him and Liz. Eighteen months, after all, isn’t much time at all.

(There’s two and a half between Mac and her older brother, and then six between her and the first of her younger sisters. So she might understand it, she thinks, how Michael and Fiona weren’t told much about the particulars of how their older brother’s heart was broken.

Not that she ever explained to her siblings much of anything, not Brian and not the breakup and not the running. Not the diagnoses and failed psych evaluations and the drugs and pink slips. In so many ways, she envies Will for this. The siblings who understand. But it’s a terrible feeling for Mac to have, so she shuts it away.)

“No hospitals,” Will says, staring down at his knees. “Not—just, MacKenzie. Please. No hospitals. I don’t like—”

“I know you don’t like them,” she murmurs. “It was an accident, Will. We just tell them it was an accident. But this needs stitches.”

“No emergency room, no hospital, no nurses.” He lifts his head almost imperceptibly. “No questions.”

Chewing on her lip, she nods. Will has never liked doctors, probably for the same reasons he straightens his spine and narrows his eyes whenever she tries to cut through his bluster. But doctors have scans and tests that can see past the skin where Will can shut her out of his head, and doctors can see the untreated fractures and ill-healed breaks better than she can attempt to pry any meaningful thoughts from his head.

Especially since he started seeing Nina Howard in the fall.

“I can run to the Walgreens on Harrison and Greenwich. See if they have any suture kits,” she says, voice measured and even. Laughing in a small way, to herself, she cocks her head, remembering trembling hands, haphazard first aid kits, and a canteen of rotgut. “Back when we were embedded… well I wouldn’t say we were trained, but Jim and I picked up on some of the lesser aspects of field medicine out of necessity. I could try…”

“Liz put a—there’s a first aid kit in the closet. She stocked it.”

For the first time, she notices that Will is trembling.

“How is she?” she asks, carefully.

“I don’t know.”

“Will.”

“I’ve been pretty drunk all day. They’ve been calling, but I just—” His voices raises for a moment, and then he extinguishes it, and shrugs unevenly. “I just wanted a bottle of aspirin. I tripped.”

Sighing, MacKenzie gives up trying to count how many wounds she has to tend, and relocates her hand to his head, combing her fingers through mussed blonde hair. “And Michael? Fiona?”

(She has no idea why he called her here, out of all people he could have asked to help him. And she has no idea what he wants from her, if he wants comfort or reassurance or just the one person in New York City that’s met his family.

Because she knows that even if they don’t talk to each other often, the McAvoy siblings have a wrought-iron bond to each other.)

“I should have just gotten on a plane to Nebraska. Been there, today. It was just one fucking day. I could have been there for them.”

“They weren’t alone.”

But he is.

Her fingers continue to drift through his hair and it’s somewhat awkward, the position, with how much taller he is than she is and with a much longer torso which exacerbates it when they’re sitting down, even when he’s slouching. But he’s letting her touch him like this, so she’s not going to stop in case it’s bringing him any comfort at all.

“My father’s family, they knew. They knew and let it happen. And I left them, I left Liz and Mickey and Fi to handle it all, on their own. I should have gone,” he says, sounding more broken and defeated than she’s ever heard him. “He’s dead. I should have just gone.”

“They weren’t alone, Will.”

“Not like I've been, you mean.”

He won’t look at her.

“I don’t mean anything,” she says quietly, retracting her hand. Looking forward, she examines the dim lighting of his living room, the wide windows, the ambient light from the neighboring buildings. Nodding to herself, she stands.

The first aid kit is a large doctor’s bag, sitting on the floor in the front of his linen closet. Mac doubts that it’s ever been opened, let alone used. She pulls it out, dusts it off, and unzippers the main pocket and rifles through the paper-wrapped gauze pads and bandages until she finds a hemostat and a pair of operating scissors. The sutures Liz chose are pre-packaged, with the nylon thread already attached to the needle. Two stitches per package.

She figures she’ll need four or five.

“I haven’t done this in years. It’s not going to look pretty.” Mac stands, still going through the kit as she walks back over to Will on the couch.

“It’s my shoulder,” he replies, voice edging towards a defensive tone.

She ignores it. “Do you want me to numb it? Liz put lidocaine in here, too.”

“Nah.”

“Okay.” She truly hopes that she doesn’t sound as unsure as she feels.

Clenching and unclenching her fingers, she finishes assembling all the supplies that she’ll need, trying to remember the last time she did simple sutures and what she didn’t have in the emergency supply pack that was forever running low and what the field medicine guide that they’d stolen from a Private had told them to do.

Mac bites her lip, looking Will over and cringing at what she’s about to say. “Just um… take off your shirt. And maybe we should move to—probably the kitchen. If you could sit at the—yeah.”

Without further instruction he groans, pushes himself up off the couch, and with a degree of visible discomfort pulls off his t-shirt. Knowing that she’s out of his line of sight, Mac lets a grimace take over her face—where there’s not lacerations there are angry contusions blooming, and she realizes how drunk he must have been to go down that hard.

She follows him into the kitchen, pausing with some hesitance when he strains to slide onto one of the stools at the island. There must be a limit to how much he’ll allow her to do, she thinks. She mustn't find that limit, so she edges up to his side, this time barely touching him (her bare hands move like magnets to his unclothed back, tracing over swollen ragged skin and the seeping blood) before pulling her hands away to place a layer of latex between them.

“You’re sure you don’t want lidocaine? I think I’m gonna have to do eight or nine stitches. The butterfly bandages should handle the rest,” she says, belatedly reaching to flip on the switch for the overhead lights over the breakfast bar, clumsily pushing it up with her elbow.

“Thanks,” he says, dully.

“Don’t thank me just yet. This will be a slow and painful venture.” Laughing, she squeezes her eyes shut and shakes her head. Then, uncapping the bottle of isopropyl alcohol, she eyes him again as she soaks a dozen cotton balls with the solution. “This is going to—”

“Sting a bit?” he asks, a crooked grin tiredly taking over his face.

She snorts, relief loosening muscles she had not realized had been pulled taut. “I was going to say hurt like a motherfucker.”

“Ah.” He laughs then, too. “Well, I’m used to that.”

“I—okay.” Tentative, she braces one hand at his waist, and begins cleaning out his cuts with the cotton ball in the other. He jerks when the alcohol touches the first wound, and as cotton ball after cotton ball is soaked through with blood she finds herself muttering an endless litany of: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Almost—and done.”

There’s a smear of red on palms and his face turns white when she uses the hemostat to extract the piece of glass from his back and then pours alcohol over it directly, but she’s seen too many soldiers felled by infection and if Will won’t go to a doctor then she _has_ to do this. At least this is gentler than the stuff from the ad hoc distillery of the Gunnery Sergeant with a crush, who supplied her with canteen after canteen to make the nights in the Afghan desert pass faster.

“It’s fine,” he gasps.

“Despite what you may think, Will, I don’t enjoy causing you pain,” she explains, blinking back the blurriness from her vision. With deceptively steady hands, she tears open the suture kits; without lidocaine, this is going to hurt, and she’s nowhere near skilled enough to stitch him up quickly. 

“I know you don’t,” he says, really looking at her for the first time since she walked into his apartment twenty minutes ago.

“Will?” She looks at him askance, not entirely sure what she’s even going to question him about. Forcibly clearing her mind, she trails a hand down his back, and feels the warmth of his skin through the latex glove covering her own.

His eyes soften. “What?”

Unable to find a suitable question, or locate her own thoughts, she instead asks, “Can I start stitching you up now?”

His gaze falls, to the counter in front of him and he turns, baring his back to her. “There’s only one person who enjoyed causing me pain. Well, he wasn’t the only, but he was the—”

“He was the first,” she finishes, the words tripping mindlessly from her tongue, and they both tense. “Fuck,” she breathes. Retrieving the hemostat and the curved suture needle is an excuse to step away, and Mac takes it. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Doesn’t make it less true,” he says after a moment, voice low and face inscrutable. Not guarded, Mac thinks, nor the forced placid expression he wore during the broadcast after he first received the call about his dad’s heart attack. Something else entirely, closer to what he looked like at the end of the broadcast, stunned silent by the news of his dad’s death. But he’s not silent, now. “I’ve tried to understand him, I mean, I _tried._ And you were there, last week. When I tried to call him. Ow. Dammit.”

Feeling her teeth tear into her lower lip, she finishes the first of the sutures, tying the black thread into a square knot until his skin meets again.

“Do you want me to stop?”

She could ice it, first. But he’s refused the lidocaine and she’s certain he’ll refuse ice, and she has an idea of why he’s doing it like this, since feeling pain is feeling _something_ and it’s concrete, even if it’s startling, and it’s something to hold onto and cherish when nothing else that you feel makes any sense at all.

“I can take a beating. Learned it from my Dad.” She must make a noise, because he turns to look at her and she curses, flinching the needle away from him. “Sorry, that was—”

“The truth,” she echoes weakly. “And you’ve already taken a beating tonight. From the end table. I have lidocaine, you don’t have to be a hardass for me.”

(She can offer him one more out.)

“How many left?”

“Six.”

“I’ll be fine.” But she’s not entirely convinced, and keeps the hand holding the needle and the thread close to her chest. Will sighs. “Mac, I’m fine. I’m fucking drunk, and saying things that I shouldn’t be saying, but I’m fine.”

Trying to breathe evenly, she rubs the back of her forearm across her mouth. “How are they? Liz, Michael, Fiona? The kids?”

“Also drunk. Not the kids,” he specifies, trying to make her laugh. He doesn’t. “You didn’t call me today, at all.”

“I thought you wanted to be alone. Or I thought—I don’t know what I thought. People said you broke up with Nina but I didn’t know if I should believe the rumors.”

“They're true,” he says simply, looking up at her with wide-open eyes.

So, so blue.

“I guess I probably should have called,” she says, and steps back to him. Pushing the needle through his skin to make the second stitch puts a halt to conversation. A stitch or nine, she muses to herself, and winds up making eight. Will, to his credit, does nothing more than grit his teeth through the rest of them.

It takes a good four inches square of gauze to cover the angry red wound, and trying to not press too hard, she tapes it in place. Trying to keep her touch clinical, she surveils the rest of his back, and then his chest, his arms.

“The rest of these need cleaning,” she says softly, her fingers charting a cut on his side and then a bruise on his bicep that’s blooming into a deep purple.

Closing his eyes, Will nods, and she begins again.

He doesn’t say anything for a while, letting his body sag against hers and keeping his eyes closed, and if it wasn’t for how uneven his breath sounds are MacKenzie would think he’s fallen asleep.

(Which would be just plain unfortunate.

She knows he needs the sleep, but he’s way too heavy for her to keep upright.)

Still, she winds her arm around his waist for support as she cleans out another troublesome laceration on his shoulder. It’s late, and neither of them are talking, and in the hush she can’t stop her body’s awareness of the fact that he’s naked from the waist up, and that from the waist down he’s in nothing more than a pair of thin cotton pajama pants.

Eventually, though, Will speaks.

“You know what I’ve been thinking about all day?”

He rolls his neck, tendons popping, and he groans.

“I tend to not assume what you’re thinking much anymore.”

His answer is a smothered bark of laughter. And then it dies, not just on his lips but on his face, and she casts her eyes away to look only on what physically ails him. With a tone of dispassionate analysis, begins. “When I was ten, it was a nasty year. Weather-wise. Did I ever tell you that the house, the one I took you to when you came to Nebraska with me, that’s not the first house I grew up in? It was right after I got home from school, so maybe four in the afternoon. Big storm just came up from the south and before long the tornado sirens were going off.”

He stops.

“Will?” she asks quietly, running her hand over his (relatively) uninjured shoulder.

“No I uh—my Mom was in town, she’d just headed in town to pick up a shift. She must have waited until I got home because Fi was still really small. My Dad was out in the fields. And not five minutes after the sirens started going off I looked out the window and I saw it. And I put the kids in the storm cellar and I—I locked it.” Frowning, Will stops himself again.

Watching him work his jaw muscles, she knows he’s deciding how to articulate what he wants to say next. Taping down more gauze, she says nothing, and waits. “I heard my Dad banging on it, telling us to let him in. He was drunk. And I—I just didn’t. And then the banging stopped. And a few minutes later I heard it pass over us.”

“The tornado?” she asks delicately, forcing her words through a throat clogged with emotion.

“Yeah,” he rasps. “I waited until the sirens stopped and I got out and everything—I mean _everything_ was gone. I thought he was too.”

The _what if_ of it is a creeping sort of startling, as MacKenzie wonders who Will would be if John had been removed from his life so much earlier. If Will would have taken his first chance to get out of Nebraska, if he’d have left at all, if he’d have gone to law school. If maybe Will had bought his own farm, or settled for some mindless office job in Lincoln and settled for a girl he met in high school or at college, settled for a manageable amount of kids. She chooses to believe that he’d never have settled for mediocrity, that even without John he’d have left.

But he might be happier, she supposes. Even if he never met her.

 _Especially_ if he never met her.

“But he survived?”

“He wandered into the shelter that we wound up in that night. Thought he was too drunk to get the door open. Didn’t think I locked him out.” His tone is more wondrous than wondering. _What if, what if, what if._ “I keep thinking what would have—why didn’t he? It was the largest tornado our part of the state had ever seen. Ten people died. How did it not get him?”

He sounds younger than she’s ever heard him. Younger, and more confused, and Will is not a man easily confounded even if he does often take the option of being willfully ignorant about certain things.

Blinking until she’s certain she won’t cry, she forces her own emotions down. Then, lifting herself up onto her toes, she hides a gentle kiss against his crown. “Will, you don’t know what he would have—you were ten. You were a little boy.”

“Anyway, after that he was really good, for a few months. He was so happy he survived,” he continues after a minute in silence, and despite his attempts at being disaffected she can tell he’s beginning to unravel. “For those months I remembered—couldn’t get it out of my head, coming out of the house with Fi. She must have been less than a year old. She was so little, and I had her against my chest. I stood outside the house and I just looked at it, coming for us. And I wondered what would happen if he was dead.”

“Will,” she murmurs, and dislikes how desperate she sounds to her own ears.

He exhales raggedly. “Now he’s dead.”

And MacKenzie, tired as she is, can barely resist the urge to verbally thank God for that.

Sweeping a stack of gauze wrappers into the trash, she opens a box of band aids to finish dressing the smaller cuts on his front. “What happened… _after_ those few good months?”

At any moment, she expects him to snap at her. But he doesn’t, just looks down to his hands where they rest palms up in his lap. Somewhere in the past hour, their boundaries have shifted and now she feels unstable and unsure, advancing slowly forward.

“We were living out of a motel room. Close quarters. _Closer_ quarters. He didn’t like that he was being left with Fi so often, while I took a job to help pay for the cost of rebuilding. He rounded on my Mom one night, and Lizbeth and Mickey and Fi were all watching.” He explains, sounding pained but more than that, weary. “I picked up an empty bottle from the trash, and I swung. It broke across his face. There was… there was glass, right here.” Lifting a hand from his lap, he prods at the dark circle under his left eye. “The people in the room next to us called the cops, it was strike three, he went away for twenty-two months.”

John McAvoy’s stints in prison aren’t new to her; occasionally the PR people hired by either ACN or Will’s agent have to clear them from his Wikipedia page and she knows that Neal found the articles on the arrests and arraignments (like rural poverty and domestic violence were just a small town oddity, four minor children be damned) in the Lincoln _Journal Star_ web archives. But she and Will have never actually spoken about it. It’s just been a thing that she’s known.

(MacKenzie has tried to remind herself over the years that loving someone doesn’t mean knowing all of their secrets. She’s not gotten good at it yet.)

“I’m sorry.”

His eyebrows knit together. “For what?”

“All of it,” she answers, taking a shaky breath.

It looks almost like that answer hadn’t occurred to him, and there’s nothing she can do but watch the muscles in his chest and back contract and release as he struggles to breathe, his eyes sliding out of focus as he tries not to cry.

“I shouldn’t have told you all this.” Sniffling, he watches her pull the latex gloves off her hands, while she tries not to watch him in return. “I just… Fi was too little but Lizzie and Mickey have to remember what I did. And they… Liz told me it was the least they could do. When I told her I’d come. When she told me not to. The least they could… do.”

_Oh, honey._

Fighting with tears herself, she places her hands on his shoulders, leans up onto her toes again, and gently presses her lips to his forehead. It’s an impulse, controlled and careful, and what Mac really wants to do is wrap her arms around him and not let go but she doesn’t know what he needs her to be tonight and barring their one hug over a year ago, they haven’t touched each other like this.

“Will, we’re—” Uncertain, she bites her lip, sliding her hands forwards, stretching her fingers over his collarbones before removing her hands entirely. “Well, we’re friends. Right?”

His response is surprisingly vehement.

“Of course we’re fucking friends, Mac. Jesus, it’s been a year and half, do you really think we’re not—” He cringes. “Nina’s gone. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she says, voice small, and even though she wants to tell him that yes, he should be sorry for bringing Nina fucking Howard into their newsroom and into his bedroom she can’t do it when he’s like this.

Her lingering resentment will be linger long enough so that they can talk about this when he’s not grieving and angry and feeling fucked up.

“I should be,” he replies assuredly.

Nodding mechanically, Mac collects all the wrappers and other medical ephemera and throws them into the trash. There’s no glass in the trash bag, so she wonders if he’s managed to clean up the mess at all, worrying about him trodding over shards of glass on bare feet while at the same time calculating the odds of whether or not Will’s gotten a tetanus booster anytime in the past few years.

“I’m done.” Feeling him watching her, she clears the worry from her face and turns back to him, trying to figure out the logistics of how to leave him. “Here, let me help you to the—and then I’ll go. Um. Do you want to go back to bed, or is the couch…?”

“The couch is fine,” he answers, curling tiredly around her when she wraps an arm around his waist. By accident, she thinks, his nose ends up pressed against her hair and she wonders if she shouldn’t be holding onto him so tightly as she steers him back into his living room, eases him down onto the couch.

Maybe she should get him a shirt. Make sure that the table isn’t still a broken heap in his bedroom. Get him dressed and make sure everything is cleaned up.

Or maybe it shouldn’t be awkward, seeing each other naked? They dated for two years, a little bare skin between the two of them is hardly anything at all, and her heart pounds from the liminal stress accompanying tonight. Will looks up at her, eyes rimmed red and vulnerable, and she decides that even if she really wants to stay she should go, that this isn’t like the night in the hospital where he was nearly dead and her presence was understandable, explainable, that she’s done what he’s asked her here to do and now she should go.

His father’s funeral was yesterday morning.

God, she wants to stay.

“Okay, well. I’m gonna—I’ll see you on Monday?” she asks, and then on another impulse (controlled and careful and nearly _calculated,_ this time) she leans down to kiss his cheek.

Flinching, Will turns his head at the last second, and her lips land on his instead. (He tastes like Jameson and cigarettes and toothpaste and like himself and every synapse in her head is sending messages from nowhere to nowhere.) Neither of them move, and it becomes a kiss instead of an accident, his hand coming up to push into her hair before he pulls their mouths apart.

 _He’s drunk_ , she reminds herself.

“Shit. I—um.” Unable to stand with his hand cupping the base of her skull, she sits down next to him instead, trying to remain calm. “Will?” she asks, but he’s gone, and clearly panicking. Trying not to panic herself, she pulls his hand from her hair and holds it between both of her own in her lap. “Asking if you’re okay would be patronizing, so I won’t. But… do you want me to stay?”

In the resulting silence, she rolls back the gauze on his shoulder and looks at the neat row of interrupted simple sutures she’s left on his shoulder.

He heaves a tenuous breath—

“Do you _want_ me to go?”

—and then another.

“No,” he replies finally, voice cracking.

“Okay. I can stay,” she whispers, squeezing his fingers. She doesn’t know why Will called her to come over tonight, maybe it was for this, too; her fingers smooth the gauze back down over the sutures. “Do you want to keep talking?”

“No,” he answers, almost by rote. And then, more hurriedly, “Yes. I don’t know.”

“Okay.” The clock hanging above his television shows that it’s now past two, and she begins to ponder how comfortable Will’s couch would be to sleep on. “Well, I’m just going to sit here.”

For a long moment it looks like he’s struggling to find what he wants to say. She waits, perhaps too exhausted to push him, or realizing that the hour is too late for more questions. Instead she just continues to hold his hand, tracing her thumb in circles over a knot of bone from when he broke it playing football.

(Or so he said. MacKenzie doesn’t know, and she's too tired to take what's between them at anything but face value.)

Somehow, his head winds up tucked against her shoulder.

“I just don’t understand.”

“Yeah, sobering up tends to make you remember that.”

He lifts his head. “Mac?”

“It’s not a story for tonight.”

She snorts softly, and he nods with the same drunken slowness, resting his head against her shoulder again.

“Okay.”

When his cell phone lights up and begins to ring, she thinks she hears him cry. Disentangling one of her hands from his, she cautiously leans just forward enough to reach where the phone sits on the coffee table, and picks it up.  _Incoming call from… Fiona McAvoy._ Looking at him, she bites her lip and ignores the call when he burrows himself against her, his fingers wrapping around her own almost painfully.

A notification for a new voicemail illuminates the screen again.

Muting the volume on his phone, Mac lifts him up from the couch, and takes him to bed. They can face the rest of the destruction in the morning.

 

* * *

 

His head is trying to remove itself from his shoulders. Or at least, that his first thought when he wakes up with a visceral headache, sore back, and a mouth full of cotton. The night before is a tattered assemblage of memories, and it’s not until Will reluctantly opens his eyes that he really starts to remember what happened.

Next to him in bed is MacKenzie.

Or _on_ the bed, since she’s on top of the duvet but under the blankets from his couch, firmly on her side of the mattress. Her arms and half of one leg peek out from under her covers, and he realizes that before coming over last night, she didn’t even bother changing out of what he assumes she wore to bed—capri pajama pants and a tank top. His eyes trace up her blanketed form to her face, where despite sleeping her eyebrows are pursed, her mouth shaped into a small frown.

And then he remembers that he kissed her.

A quiet stream of obscenities rushes out of his mouth, and with a sprightliness he definitely did not feel a moment before, he rolls out of bed and pads silently out of his bedroom. At which point he pads silently (as possible, his knees and back crackling and popping as he tries to stretch the stiffness and soreness out of his joints and ligaments) back into his bedroom, realizing the broken glass tabletop has been cleaned up, the fact that he’s wearing a new shirt, and that someone has tidied his living room.

Trying to swallow, Will stops, and watches Mac sleep.

He needs to apologize to her.

Still stiff, and sore, and head still pounding, he creeps over to her. Holding his breath, he neatens the blankets until they cover all of her, and pulls at the duvet until it slides out from under her frame, and covers her with that, too.

Next is securing a bottle of naproxen to his hand, and he does so while edging closer to his cell phone, not knowing how many more messages he’ll find when he unlocks the screen. His dad has been in the ground for less than twenty-four hours. Dead, slightly more than a week. Hadn’t seen nor spoken to him for nearly a decade before that. Hadn’t lived under his roof another twenty-five years beyond that. But having lived under John McAvoy’s roof... he still doesn’t know how to sift through that rubble, and rebuild.

Time hasn’t helped. Not with this, and he doesn’t know what else to try.

So he leaves his cell phone where it lays, tosses back three capsules of an over-the-counter painkiller, and slides back into bed and next to MacKenzie.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!


End file.
